Logical schematization and reappraisal of the analytical argument against the theory of natural selection in Jerry Fodor’s and Massimo Piatelli–Palmerini’s What Darwin Got Wrong Trevor Rawbone (April, 2023) Introduction This article comprises a schematization and reappraisal of the analytical argument against the theory of natural selection (TNS) in Fodor’s and Piatelli–Palmerini’s book What Darwin Got Wrong (2010). 1 Fodor and Piatelli–Palmerini argue that TNS—the theory that phenotypic traits are fixed by virtue of their fitness in an ecology—doesn’t describe, explain, or predict trait fixation. Fodor and Piatelli–Palmerini provided a relatively extensive book-length formulation of their analytical argument, which may have fettered its reception and dissipated its impact. This short article is a condensed and focused re-presentation of the work, which puts the analytical argument against TNS of Fodor and Piatelli–Palmerini in schematic logical form, emphasizing the key components, in particular, that TNS doesn’t show that fitness is necessarily connected to the technical notion of selection and that the distinction in TNS between phenotypes and their ecologies is specious. Drawing from a conference presentation by Jerry Fodor, 2 it is argued that the strength of the analytical argument rests on the combination of these two factors, because, presuming these central components of TNS are vacuous, the theory doesn’t make a strong verifiable claim, and doesn’t cover any and all of the cases it proposes to generalize over. The analytical argument against TNS The following is a logical schematization of the analytical argument against TNS in Fodor and Piattelli– Palmerini (2010): 1. IF there are such things as ‘piggyback traits’ (Gould and Lewontin 1979), 3 which are arbitrary non-fit traits that are connected to fit traits during the reproductive cycle of a phenotype (bird, bear, etc.); 2. AND there is no generalizable distinction between the two key terms of TNS, that is, between phenotypes and ecologies; 3. AND TNS is presumed to operate in and only in the ontological and scientific level of biology (not physics or chemistry, for example); 4. THEN TNS has no principled way of showing how phenotypic traits are fixed by virtue of their ecologies in the general case (across all cases traditionally presumed to fall under, or be explained by, TNS). Explanation of the argument The following is a point-by-point explanation and analysis of the schematized argument above: (1) This point assumes that fitness, in the specific and limited sense of somehow merely causing or helping to cause a phenotype to survive in a particular ecology, is a valid concept. Piggyback traits mean that the reproductive cycle does not act like a sieve to ‘select’ only a fit trait, but that non-fit traits are generally bound to fit traits, and as such often pass without hindrance to offspring. The technical notion of selection is thus weakened; there seems to be only selection of, not selection for. (2) Recent work in biology backs this point up 1 : there is often no generalizable distinction between phenotypes (or phenotypic activity) and their ecologies. In most individual cases there is usually a complex and unique interconnectedness between the two, such as the peculiar way birds build their own nests for instance. The lack of a clear boundary between the terms is critical, since in TNS ecologies are proposed to causally elicit phenotypes in the general case (by selection). 1